Halloween! What better way to spend it than in Sri Lanka?
Sheena Mann, Megan McDermott, Paula Hill and Lynne Carrigan set off on Friday the 24th October 2008 to an island South of India. Sri Lanka is located about 31 kilometres off the Southern Coast of India. Home to around twenty million people, and us, for a week.
We travelled for 13 hours on the plane to be met by Dreams and Teams Young Leaders from Anula Vidayala. Then we had a two hour bus journey through Colombo, the very busy capital to our accommodation. We stayed in the local youth hostel and spent most of our time with the eleven Young Leaders from Anula Vidayala.
Colombo is an exciting city! Our journey through the city allowed us to see a whole new culture from the word go: food, clothes, vehicles, religion. Every minute spent there, we learnt something new. A bit like many areas of the world, Sri Lanka faces conflict. It is between the Sinhalese and Tamil Tigers who are fighting for independence in the North of the island.
We visited Anula School and saw some classes. We took part in an Awards Ceremony for the Dreams and Teams Young Leaders and helped with a swimming festival. We were able to observe the girls from our link school and have an understanding of them. The biggest inspiration for me is that all of the girls are doing at least four A-levels and are working at grade A, to even be considered for university. Their determination is very inspiring and they know to do well in life they need to work hard.
Seeing their religious culture was also very exciting. The girls practise Buddhism and took their religion very seriously. We visited a local Buddhist temple, but the temple that stood out for me was the visit to Dalada Maligava in Kandy. The sacred tooth relic of Lord Buddha is kept there. Seeing the altar where the tooth was being held was quite exciting and not many people have seen the tooth for real. The temple is very sacred and special.
Altogether the trip was immense and worthwhile we did so much in that week. We visited an elephant orphanage which we all found interesting, especially when an elephant charged.
